


By Cold Frozen

by afrikate



Series: The Curse of Natalis [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Mercy Thompson Series - Patricia Briggs
Genre: Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Canon-Typical Violence, Decapitation, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Steve Rogers and the 21st Century
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-23
Updated: 2017-04-23
Packaged: 2018-10-22 19:58:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10704048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afrikate/pseuds/afrikate
Summary: Steve Rogers doesn't trust the 21st century.





	By Cold Frozen

**Author's Note:**

> Short timestamps in the Curse of Natalis series. Steve is still feeling out this new century he landed in.
> 
> Takes place in between "Upon the Wild Waves" and part 4, which hasn't been posted yet. This isn't going to make a whole lot of sense without reading parts 1-3.

New York City, April 21, 2012 

Steve spends a lot of time trying not to think. Days are… they’re ok. Fury keeps him busy-- briefings, trainings about things like security and sexual harassment. Daily, they let him use a gym where he can let go a bit, pummel a bag. He’s still in Manhattan, at SHIELD HQ, but they rarely let him out into the world. He’ll be angry about that, later, he knows. Right now, it’s like all his feelings are hitting a wall-- he can see them but can’t reach the place where he’s furious, where he’s heartbroken. It was the same, he remembers, when Mom died.

He lies in bed at night, not sleeping-- can’t sleep, bed too soft, room too quiet without the traffic below, without Dum Dum’s snores or the sound of sentries on the watch. He lies there and dissects the conversations he hears, meetings he attends. Treats it like intel, taking it apart to examine each piece.

The worst part, Steve thinks, lying in bed the third evening, is how often he thinks, ’Wait till I tell Bucky.’

Bucky’d loved those science stories in the pulps, flying cars and life on Mars. He’d read anything he could get his hands on-- borrowed from the Donnelly brothers, swiped from the five and dime, checked out from the library on a Sunday afternoon. Three, four times a day, Steve will read something or hear something and think, ‘Bucky will love that’ or ‘What a crock, this future isn’t anything like what we read, eh, Buck.’

Steve gets better at hiding it, though, the way those things hit him. Too many looks of pity from too many agents and SHIELD personnel-- he doesn’t need another reason to hate it here.

***

They give him files on all the Commandos, brown SSR folders like the files he saw just days ago, planning that last assault on Schmidt. The files are decades old now, paper gone yellow, smelling musty, with updates in the back in brighter, crisper paper. They don't give him a file for Bucky, and he almost asks, but stops himself at the last minute. Of course there’s no file for Bucky-- Steve knows exactly what happened to him.

On the front of each file, in addition to name and rank and other basic information, there’s a red stamp that says “deceased.” All except for Peg’s. It makes him grab that one first, a thick file stuffed full of paper, and start to open it. But in his head he's calculating dates and he realizes that she's 91, she just had a birthday. He closes the file quickly, pushes it away. Covers his eyes with his hands and forces himself to breathe in and out, counting breaths like when he’d have an asthma attack. When his hands stop shaking, he pulls over Col. Phillips’s file instead-- the man had already been an old soldier when Steve had been recruited.

***

Howard’s file makes him frown. Makes him get up and pace around the small room, makes him close his hands over the back of the desk chair so he doesn’t turn around and punch the wall. Col. Philips, the other Commandos-- their deaths were at home, with family. Hell, Morita died surrounded by his seventeen grandchildren and five great-grandchildren, and Steve wants to laugh because he should have known-- Morita always said he’d end up with his own dynasty. But Howard…

The file says Howard drank too much, drove too fast, that the road was winding and his reflexes compromised. It was an accident, says the file, that killed his wife and left behind a son who was still in college. But Steve remembers Howard’s reflexes, even dulled with drink. And the file has odd blanks, things missing. It makes him wonder, not for the first time, what they aren’t telling him.

***

On a Saturday (he knows it’s a Saturday because his room has a wall calendar and he started crossing off the days just to keep track), Fury says, “Interested in getting out of here, Captain?”

Steve sits in the chair across from Fury’s desk and studies him, waiting for the catch. He’s wanted to get out since he arrived, and that hasn’t mattered worth a damn so far.

“I wouldn’t mind stretching my legs,” he says, doing his best to act nonchalant. It’s easier than he expected.

“Well, then, Captain, feel free.” Fury waves at the door to his office. “My assistant has everything you need.”

Steve watches Fury another minute, before he stands, goes to talk to Merilee. She’s an older white lady, hair gone gray, but her posture is still straight, and she reminds him of the ladies that used to run the neighborhood back home.

 

* * *

 

New York City, April 30, 2012 

“Excuse me,” Steve says, standing awkwardly in front of the scarred wooden counter, hands stuffed in his pockets.  

“Yes, young man?” The librarian is a small, dark-skinned woman, and her name tag reads Mrs. Gutierrez. She looks up, and up, neck at an angle that cannot be comfortable, so Steve hunches even further, trying to seem shorter.

“Ma’am,” he tries to smile, wills himself to be matter of fact. “What do I need to do to use the computers?”

She points to the clipboard on the counter. “Add your name to the list. If a computer is free, you can just write down the time you sit down. Otherwise, we’ll call names from the list when a computer becomes available-- 30 minute limit.” She looks around at the room. “Right now it's kind of slow, so pick any one you want. We keep the sound off-- if you want to listen to something, you’ll need to use headphones.”

Steve nods. He imagines that's easy for most people these days-- seems like half the people on the streets have wires coming out of their ears. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Oh, and please clear your browser history when you're done.”

Steve looks back, and he must look confused, because she hands him a paper that reads, _Computer Basics_. “Here you go, sir.”

He ends up sitting in front of the most defensible computer available, though his back is still uncomfortably exposed. As he sits, he notes that the Asian woman who is one half of his tail is sitting in the overstuffed chairs in the reading area. The other agent, a Black man, is just coming out of the men's room. Steve turns to the screen in front of him, watching out of the corner of his eye while the man heads to the new book shelves along the far side of the room, the woman studies something on her phone. Then he rolls his shoulders and focuses on the screen.

During his first week at SHIELD, Steve got a crash course in how to use search engines, the young agent tasked with helping him eager and excited. She'd seemed disappointed when the first thing he'd asked her to search was why bananas tasted so bad. He'd gotten a sense of how the ‘Google’ worked, though, and he's been developing a mental list of things to look up. Now that he's got about as much privacy as possible in a public library, he takes a deep breath and begins typing with his index fingers, ‘werewolf.’

The computer barely hesitates before spitting out “about 35,700,000 results.” The first is something called “Wikipedia,” and on the strength of that, he clicks the link.

“Jeez.” He skims through, then scrolls back to the top to read it again a bit slower. “Jeez, Bucky,” he murmurs to himself, shaking his head. In this brave new world, it looks like werewolves aren’t so much a secret any more. “I wonder what you’d say about this.”

***

It turns out that in 30 minutes you can find out a whole lot if you just click link after link through the internet encyclopedia. Werewolves are the least of it, because the Fae are out, too, have been out for a while. And it seems like the Fae are a hell of a lot better actors than Steve is-- future people appear to have bought the propaganda that Fae are harmless, that they just want to make good like any other immigrant group. Or they did right up until a couple of years ago.

It's the third time he's played through the same video-- maybe turning off the sounds works for regular humans, but Steve can hear clearly if he concentrates. The film starts out choppy, like whoever was filming it was being jostled by the crowd. A distinguished older white man in a suit, hand on the shoulder of a well-dressed younger white man, is standing in front of a group of news cameras, saying, “--just want to put this behind us.”

There's suddenly a swell of noise, everyone talking at once, and underneath the sound of bells chiming. Someone says, “Look at the horses,” and the camera swings over the crowd in a dizzying rush, to focus on where at least 40 black horses are walking up the street, their riders all in black. They stop in a double row and another horseman, all in white on a white horse, rides through them slowly. It’s clear to Steve the rider is Fae-- he’s glowing softly and carrying a sword. The sounds of the crowd die away and the camera follows as the rider directs his horse walks up the steps, until he stops in front of the men who were speaking to the media.

The Fae’s voice is clear and carrying-- Steve can understand everything he says, even with the sound so low. “What was done today was not justice,” he begins. “This man raped and tortured my daughter. When he finished, he would have killed her.” The Fae pauses, shaking his head. “But you all see us as monsters--so frightened of the dark that you cannot see truly your own monsters among you. You have made it clear that we and our children are not citizens of this country, that we are separate. And that we will receive a separate justice.”

“It is not meet that my daughter’s attacker should live,” says the Fae, and then he brings up a sword and cuts off the younger man’s head.

The crowd should be going nuts-- Steve knows what scared people are like, how they react, and a beheading in a public place should cause chaos. But everyone is frozen, silent. The man turns and looks into the news camera-- the recording Steve’s watching catches him in profile, with bloody sword raised to the sky.

“We, the Fae, declare ourselves free of the laws of the United States of America. We do not recognize them. They have no authority over us.” Steve gasps, again, even though he knows what is coming. “From this moment forward, we are our own sovereign nation. I, Alistair Beauclaire, once and again Gwyn ap Lugh, Prince of the Gray Lords, do so determine.” He takes a breath, and concludes, “All will abide my wishes.”

The video ends abruptly, and Steve slumps, looking down at the keyboard, blinking. He glances around, notes the position of the agents across the room, and then turns back to the computer to follow the directions on how to delete his history. He feels ill, not from the violence, though it was shocking to see it in front of a courthouse, in the United States.

Since he woke up, SHIELD has emphasized that the war is over, that the Allies defeated the Axis, that good prevailed over evil. He’s been waiting the whole time for the other shoe to drop-- if the war were really over, then they’d at least have to talk about demobilizing him, and that hasn’t been brought up once. Instead, they’ve been feeding him information about the last seventy years in dribs and drabs, so as not to overwhelm him, they say. He wonders at what point in their careful plan they’ll bring up a new war, on American soil, with supernaturally strong creatures. And how desperate he will be for some purpose in his life, how eager he’ll be to join a righteous war.

At least, he thinks, standing up and pushing in his chair and heading back toward the librarian’s desk, now he knows there’s nothing righteous about this. Human hypocrisy and a miscarriage of justice, that’s not something he’s willing to fight for.

**Author's Note:**

> Just a quick note to say thanks to everyone who's been reading so far and those who are patiently waiting for the next part. It's written, it's in beta, but it needs more work. 
> 
> Unfortunately, life has been kicking my beta and me around a bit, so it probably won't be up for a while longer. I hope that you enjoy this-- treat it as a teaser of parts 4 and 5. Steve's back! He and Bucky have a lot to talk about. :) 
> 
> Thanks to everyone who's commented and subscribed so far-- you're the best!


End file.
